booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

Chapter Eight: On-the-job training
The executive director of the Medina Foundation, which carefully directed Norton
Clapp’s philanthropy, was Greg Barlow. Booth recommended him for the job, which ended
up boosting his own stock with the boss. A former Boy Scout, Barlow was Clapp’s kind of
man. He’d been awarded the Silver Star, a Purple Heart and a chest-full of other medals in
Vietnam. Combat also italicized his inclination to live
like there was no tomorrow. Larry Faulk remembers
getting Barlow a job in Olympia when he was in
the State Senate. “Greg was staying at our house
and he was raising all kinds of hell. He wouldn’t
make his bed in the morning and he might up and
take off with Mary’s car.” But by the time he got to
the Medina Foundation, Barlow was a detail man,
decisive, tough-minded. He got things done. Clapp
and Gardner vicariously admired his ballsiness. Barlow
also shared the boss’s view that charitable money
should be invested as wisely as working capital. The
Medina Foundation, which has disbursed more than
$69 million since it was founded by Clapp in 1947, has
concentrated on programs that help the handicapped,
feed the poor and educate deserving young people.
But if you want a grant, you have to prove you will
spend it efficiently. “During the ’60s every fool in the
Booth as CEO of the Laird Norton Company and
world solved the unemployment problem by setting trustee at UPS.
Photo courtesy University of Puget Sound.
up his own job development company and applying
for a grant,” Barlow once observed. “It was silly money.” The Medina Foundation, he added,
expected “the bleeding hearts” to run an agency that could pass an audit.
Like a tough big brother, Barlow became Booth’s fixer. They commiserated when
Clapp was underwhelmed by some assignment they’d labored over. One day, Barlow came
into Booth’s office, shaking his head. “Look at this,” he said, forking over a report Clapp had
red-penciled like a freshman composition paper. Hardly a sentence Barlow had written had
survived intact. “I had to laugh,” Booth remembers. “Norton really put you on the spot.
You had to be clear. You had to be able to speak concisely and articulate your point, and
he didn’t like you to try and get away with things. You learned that in a hurry. I saw him
once a year for a big meeting to review things. I’d be all prepared, trying to anticipate what
he really wanted to know. But he’d always catch you off guard on something. He would sit
there and doze off. He was sleeping, but he was still thinking. He never stopped thinking.
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